Along came a spider

So Bud Selig has popped up out of his spider hole to announce that Major League Baseball would not celebrate Barry Bonds’ impending 715th home run. You have to hand it to the man, he certainly is good at penalty-killing.

Selig has been working hard to push back the celebration on Judgment Day, the day that Bonds meets Henry Aaron (which is still a longshot by any reasonable standard), but he at least has a plausible reason to do so this time, specifically this: It is, well, second.

But the fact that he found a better than average excuse for inaction this time doesn’t change the real deal here, which is that Selig and the entire MLB road show hits its collective knees each night praying to the God that made Alexander Cartwright and the antitrust exemption that Bonds flames out before he gets close to Aaron. It is baseball’s standard reaction to any problem — to look the other way until it actually lands on the game, and then come up with some lame explanation about how it never really saw it coming, or how it knew it was coming years ahead of time and already had plans in place to address it.

In the meantime, the BALCO grand jury has its own scorecard, and that worries Selig far more than Bonds closing in on Ruth. Or should, anyway.